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Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of how Apple fans used to love to quote Fitts Law to convince themselves that the Macintosh OS UI was any good. Meanwhile, Apple never really followed Fitts Law very well with the Mac OS or iOS and they quite obviously can't even get the most basic functionality right, like Window or File management.

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While I can't tell Apple they did the same for classic MacOS, for the latter they did provide guidelines for developers about their design philosophy and while OSX changed visually over the years, for most of the part it works in same way - controls, widgets, buttons do the same. Microsoft tried doing same thing around Vista but they never managed to keep following own rules and OS, Office, Windows Live software releases were always split apart in terms of how they look and work; this still happens even today - Metro interface still shares the ground with classic elements. Not mention that deep beneath all visual changes they made in last 18 years there are still resources dating 9x/NT times.

Fitts's law is why the menu bar belongs at the top of the screen. But not even Apple gets everything right, or applies the psychological principles that lead to the easiest, most efficient UX. If they did, they would've used pie menus a long time ago.

As for file management, that's one area where Apple had it right and then buggered it up. Everyone agrees that spatial Finder was a revolution in working with files visually, then Apple changed to navigational Finder for OS X. Boo.

I remember the spatial finder making my life difficult in the MacOS 7 days. For example, if I had a parent and child directory open at the same time in list view and then expanded the child to drill down to another directory, the finder would obnoxiously close the child directory window. I found the navigational approach in OS X to be a breath of fresh air.

I switched to Mac a year ago after more than 25 years using only using windows.. there are some glaring holes in mac os, but it's 1000x better than windows (and I'm not even going to get into the Linux argument).

So I've used Mac, Windows and Linux since the late 90s. With the amount of experience that I have, I'd bet real money that you're not very familiar with any of them since you have that opinion.

I'd love to hold a contest where we test people's productivity on each platform because whenever I watch someone who "likes it better than anything else" and supposedly knows even how to use a Mac, they're obviously incompetent when you watch them try to use it. It's absolutely hilarious watching someone trying to quickly find the application window that they want to switch to on a Mac, especially if they've full-screened some windows. (You aren't even allowed to have a real maximize function that always works the way you expect it to in every application lmao!)

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